In iTunes, it has always bothered me that when I am in another playlist than the one playing, pressing the space bar would sometimes pause the track and sometimes completely stop the track. Sometimes I just want to pause the track, but I am always afraid that if I don't return to the playlist that it's playing in, the track will stop (if you listen to classical music, having to restart or re-find your place in a 30 minute track can be a pain). Other times I actually want to stop the track so I can press the spacebar again to play in the playlist I am in.

I could never figure out the pattern to this behavior, so I would always take the fail-safe method of moving to the playing playlist to pause. However, I discovered the other day that I don't have to. The Play/Pause button has the pause symbol (two vertical rectangles) if it is going to pause, and the stop symbol (a square) if it is going to stop. No more guessing!

[kirkmc adds: This is less of a hint than an observation, but it's one that had me scratching my head for a while in the early days of iTunes. Note also that if you are playing a song from one playlist, then switch to another to organize files for example, when the song ends, iTunes won't play the next song in its playlist. If you're playing from your library, however - in browse mode for example - it will continue playing subsequent tracks.]

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't know what robg is talking about here, but if you start playing a song in a playlist and switch to another playlist to organize, iTunes will definitely keep playing songs in that original playlist once it's done with the first one.

What it *won't* do, however, is continue to play songs if you initially started playing songs while in the "Music" section of your library, and then you changed the view of that section by searching for a song or browsing.

There are a few issues with this pause vs stop button. My issue is if a playlist is open in it's own window (double click a playlist) and this playlist is playing, with iTunes in the background you use a play/pause hotkey (or Apple remote, doesn't matter), it will stop instead of pause, then play will start playing from the main iTunes window. With iTunes focused (foreground) it doesn't have this issue. This is on my list of bugs to submit to Apple...

I use Party Shuffle to listen to all my tracks and I never open playlists in new windows. Apparently, in the case of multiple windows it can make a difference which window is in the front (or I should say frontmost: when you use programs like Quicksilver trigers to stop/pause iTunes when it isn't active frontmost is what matters).

BTW, anyone have any idea how long this behavior or different symbols has existed in iTunes?